Sometimes a ratio is so out of whack that you know something is seriously screwy, such as Hillary Clinton’s 100x return on cattle futures. Such is the case with Coffee City, Texas, which had 50 police officers for a town of 250.
After raking in enough cash from traffic citations to pay a king’s ransom, Coffee City in Henderson County shuttered its police department last week after the mayor criticized the management of the small town’s law enforcement.
Coffee City is a small town on the shores of Lake Palestine on State 155 between Palestine and Tyler. It’s about 110 miles southeast of Dallas.
Mayor Jeff Blackstone published a news release on the city’s website on September 1 explaining the city council’s decision to suspend Chief JohnJay Portillo amid questions about his management of the police force.
“After being informed of the recent allegations against our Chief of Police and the city’s reserve officer programs, the city council and myself felt it necessary for us to place Chief Portillo on a thirty-day suspension,” Blackstone said.
“During this time, we will be investigating this matter internally as well as seeking counsel from an independent investigation firm to validate our findings. Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.”
The investigation did not last long. Allegations of poor hiring practices by Portillo and numerous concerns about misconduct by officers in the Coffee City Police Department meant the council’s simplest option was to shut it down.
The department had 50 officers for a town of only about 250 people, an extraordinary ratio of one officer for every five residents.
CBS affiliate KHOU reported in late August that the city received more than $1 million in a single year from approximately 5,100 traffic citations, more than any other city of that size.
Speaking of KHOU, here’s their roundup report on Coffee City, where they talk about how a lot of Coffee City officers had problems on other police jobs:
“More than half of Coffee City officers had been suspended, demoted, terminated or dishonorably discharged from their previous jobs.”
“Their prior discipline ranges from excessive force to public drunkenness, untruthfulness, and association with known criminals. Criminal charges include DWI, theft, aggravated assault, family violence and endangering a child.”
Many Coffee City officers worked extra jobs…including the police chief. “Portillo was working security for a Southeast Houston apartment complex. Nearly 200 miles away from Coffee City.” And he demanded that Harris County Constables file charges on people. Indeed, Coffee City officers demanding Harris County constables file charges became a drain on resources.
When Portillo applied for the Coffee City job, he failed to mention that he had active warrants in Florida for DWI and failure to appear.
“Turns out there are a half dozen full time Coffee City police officers who don’t even work in Coffee City, Texas. Instead they work from home more than three hours and nearly 200 miles away in Houston.” There are some police administrative jobs that can be worked from home, but I can’t imagine a town Coffee City’s size having more than one or two. But that’s because it’s for the warrant division from the speed trap operation. And they’re being paid on “performance based” commission revenue of $150 for each warrant cleared.
Are speed trap legal in Texas? Yes, but they’re discouraged, as municipalities and counties are required to remit traffic ticket revenues exceeding 30% of the previous year’s total revenue to the state. It’s unclear whether this was done in the case of Coffee City.
I’m not a big fan of electric vehicles, which still don’t have the range or battery longevity to be tempting as a regular driving option.
Also, outside Telsa (which obviously has some record of financial success), the whole EV space seems screwy. Today’s case in point: A company called Lucid, which I only know from various sketchy speed-test videos on YouTube, paid its CEO $379 million for 2022:
It’s rare for CEOs to rebuke their peers’ outlandish pay packages—mostly because they’d be throwing stones from glass houses—but Lucid Motors’ CEO Peter Rawlinson drew sharp criticism from his EV rival Elon Musk on Monday after earning the title of the highest paid executive in the automotive business.
“Beware any company where leadership compensation is not linked to performance,” the Tesla CEO wrote on X in response to a post about Rawlinson’s pay.
Rawlinson received a $379 million compensation package in 2022 for his role at the luxury EV maker Lucid, including a $575,000 base salary, $5.5 million of stock options, and an incredible $373 million in stock awards, according to a new CEO compensation survey from Automotive News and Equilar.
Notwithstanding Musk’s criticism, Rawlinson earned his huge pay package after hitting market-cap targets for Lucid early last year, SEC filings show. Lucid, like 88% of the 250 largest publicly traded U.S. firms, now uses performance-based compensation for at least some portion of its executive pay.
Snip.
Lucid’s stock fell more than 82% in 2022, and the company earned total revenue of just $608.2 million. Also, when comparing Rawlinson’s pay to his peers in the automotive business, his latest compensation package appears extreme. Rawlinson’s total compensation in 2022 was 11 times greater than the $34 million earned by the second-highest-paid automotive CEO, GM’s Mary Barra, and 21 times greater than the $18.3 million Ford CEO Jim Farley made.
CEOs at fellow EV startups aren’t making anywhere near Rawlinson’s total compensation, either. Rivian Automotive CEO Robert Scaringe earned roughly $1 million in 2022, even though his company is now worth over $22 billion, over 50% more than Lucid Motors’ roughly $14 billion.
Keep in mind that Lucid lost over $2 billion over the last year. Now, startups can take a while before they turn profitable, but paying the CEO of an unprofitable company hundred of millions of dollars to boost the stock price of a money-losing company sounds awful pump-and-dumpish to me. The EV space is hardly free of companies that turned out to be run by fraudsters.
I haven’t been covering the Ken Paxton impeachment because I don’t think I have anything novel to say about it that hasn’t been covered better elsewhere. Enjoy the Friday LinkSwarm!
U.S. credit card debt tops $1 trillion. Thanks, Joe Biden.
Truth about our current economic situation:
We went into a recession after two back to back quarters of -1.5 over a year ago. When this happened, the establishment changed the parameters that define recession. We’ve remained at a net loss with job creation and “Bidenomics”. This isn’t recovery and everyone knows it. https://t.co/RXltpBNxhp
The feature that really made The Daily Show famous was its masterful use of archival video clips to reveal the hypocrisy of the chattering classes. Stewart would set his target on some party shill or professional talking head being condescending, self-important, dishing out blame, kissing whatever ring he’d been paid to kiss. And then the show would play a clip of the same talking head’s appearance on a C-SPAN 3 four-in-the-morning call-in show from ten years ago, back when he’d been paid to kiss another ring, saying the exact opposite thing.
There was a clip, there was always a clip. And our righteous host would send these hacks packing.
Through all this, certain public figures would be transformed into storylines with narratives and characters, with inside jokes and recurring bits. The media’s storytellers became the subjects of a theater of the absurd. It got so that when certain figures would show up in a segment, you knew you were about to witness them receive their just comeuppance, a great spectacle of spilled archival blood. The audience would titter in excited anticipation.
It was a delight to watch.
Snip.
What had created a culture of “just talking on TV without any accountability,” as one Daily Show writer put it, was not only the sheer volume and speed of the news. It was this true fact that will sound insane to anyone under the age of thirty: People on television reasonably assumed that no one would hear what they had said ever again.
As essayist Chuck Klosterman records in The Nineties: A Book, the key characteristic of twentieth-century media was its ephemerality. You experienced it in real time and internalized what was important and what it felt like. Then you moved on. “It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.”
People used to argue with their friends about the plot of a show or what the score had been in the ball game because, well, how were you going to check? Unless you had personally saved the newspaper or recorded it on your VCR, you would need to go to a literal archive and pull it up on microfilm.
TV news was even shakier, as networks often recorded over old tapes. Some of this footage only exists today because of the obsessive efforts of one Philadelphia woman who recorded news broadcasts on 140,000 VHS tapes over forty years.
And so, if you were a pundit or a commentator or a “spin doctor” PR flak, you could say whatever suited your needs at the moment, or even lie with impunity — as long as your lie did not become its own pseudo-event. Your lasting impact was whatever stuck in viewers’ heads and hearts. And if you changed your tune in the months or years afterwards, who would remember?
The Daily Show would remember.
The explosion of live broadcast and cable news had created a new, completely under-valued resource for whoever thought to harness it: catalog clips. Soon, new digital technology could preserve content in amber, allowing for its retrieval, repurposing, or referencing at any time.
It’s a long essay, and I don’t necessarily agree with all the writer’s points, but it’s worth reading.
There was no state of emergency, no curfews, no orders to stay at home or shelter in place. Young Swedes were encouraged to continue with their sports training and events. Schools remained open, and so did offices, factories, restaurants, libraries, shopping centers, gyms, and hairdressers. As a rule, borders were not closed to fellow Europeans and public transportation kept running.
There were no mask mandates and not even a recommendation for the public to use masks—until January 2021, when they were recommended on public transportation during rush hours (7–9 a.m. and 4–6 p.m. on weekdays). While some other governments forced school children to wear face masks, Tegnell even warned against making children wear them, saying that “school is no optimal place for face masks.”6
One can see how Sweden’s path diverged from that of its peers by consulting the latest Human Freedom Index, which has data through 2020. During this first year of the pandemic, Sweden’s freedom rating only fell by 0.19 on a 10‐point scale, compared to 0.49 in Britain and 0.52 in the United States. The only rich country that saw a smaller decline in freedom than Sweden was Singapore, at 0.16.7
Snip.
Analysts from other countries—and even some Swedish scholars—predicted disaster. One influential Swedish model, inspired by the famous British Imperial College study, predicted that Sweden would have 20,000 COVID-19 patients needing intensive care by early May 2020 and a need for intensive care units around 40 times over capacity. By July 1, Sweden would have 82,000 COVID-19 deaths. The Imperial College model predicted between 66,000 and 90,000 deaths without mitigation efforts, and a peak demand of intensive care unit patients 70 times higher than capacity.
Snip.
When you look at excess deaths during the three pandemic years, 2020–2022, compared to the previous three years, you get a very different picture. According to this measure, Sweden’s excess death rate during the pandemic was 4.4 percent higher than previously. Compared to the data that other countries report to Eurostat, this is less than half of the average European level of 11.1 percent, and remarkably, it is the lowest excess mortality rate during the pandemic of all European countries, including Norway, Denmark, and Finland.
“Poland Aims To Create Largest Army In Europe Within Two Years.” Golly, who would need a large army with such historically peaceful neighbors as Germany and Russia?
e Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) declared a statewide lockdown of all its correctional facilities on Wednesday morning, citing increased contraband-related incidents and drug-related inmate homicides.
TDCJ said most inmate-on-inmate homicides “are tied back to illegal drugs … and over the last five years, the volume of illegal narcotics entering the system has substantially increased.”
In response to the drug and murder epidemic in Texas jails, TDCJ is implementing the following strategies to restore order:
Systemwide Lockdown: Each facility will limit the movement of inmates and their contact with those outside the prison. Inmates and staff will undergo intensified searches to intercept and confiscate contraband.
Digital Mail: TDCJ is completing the rollout of the digital mail program. Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in paper soaked in K2 or methamphetamines coming into our facilities. The digital mail program will halt this contraband being sent through traditional mail. Effective September 6, 2023, all inmate mail should be addressed and sent to the Digital Mail Center. All mail received this week will be delivered to the digital mail processing center. More information about this program can be found here: TDCJ News – TDCJ Digital Mail Rollout.
Increased K9 Searches and Other Technology: To assist in contraband detection and outside funding related to contraband, TDCJ will be deploying additional resources. Specialized search teams and narcotic dogs will be deployed to units and staff will be subject to enhanced search procedures.
Comprehensive Searches: All persons entering our facilities at all locations will undergo comprehensive searches.
“Due to the fact staff will be concentrating on these search efforts, visitation will be canceled until further notice. Inmates will still have access to the phone system and tablets,” TDCJ said.
If drugs are getting into Texas prisons, there’s over a 90% chance correctional staff are getting them in there.
“There is no climate emergency,” the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) said in its World Climate Declaration (pdf), made public in August. “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”
A total of 1,609 scientists and professionals from around the world have signed the declaration, including 321 from the United States.
The coalition pointed out that Earth’s climate has varied as long as it has existed, with the planet experiencing several cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age only ended as recently as 1850, they said.
“Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming,” the declaration said.
Warming is happening “far slower” than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools,” the coalition said, adding that these models “exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases” and “ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.” For instance, even though climate alarmists characterize CO2 as environmentally-damaging, the coalition pointed out that the gas is “not a pollutant.”
Carbon dioxide is “essential” to all life on earth and is “favorable” for nature. Extra CO2 results in the growth of global plant biomass while also boosting the yields of crops worldwide.
CLINTEL also dismissed the narrative of global warming being linked to increased natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and droughts, stressing that there is “no statistical evidence” to support these claims.
“There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are,” it said.
“California mom Jessica Konen won a $100,000 settlement from her daughter’s school district, Spreckels Union School District, after Buena Vista Middle School had socially transitioned her 11-year-old daughter, Alicia, without her knowledge or consent.”
Remember how the UK was economically lagging other countries in Europe and Remainers blamed Brexit? Yeah, not so much.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) now says that the UK economy actually recovered from the pandemic recession back in 2021. It turns out that wholesalers and the healthcare sector, in particular, had produced much greater output than previously thought.
These updated figures suggest that the UK economy is as much as two per cent larger than previously believed. This means that the UK can no longer be considered the worst-performing economy in the G7. In fact, post-Brexit, the UK recovered from the pandemic at a similar rate to France and at a faster pace than Germany, Europe’s largest economy.
The ONS’s revision is extraordinary. As one leading economist put it: ‘The entire UK economic narrative – post-pandemic – has just been revised away.’ The very basis for the Remainer elites’ narrative of doom has now been shattered before our eyes.
Mark Felton visits Buckingham Palace, and is Not Amused. “The rooms open to the public are, of course, lavishly decorated. The amount of gold painted furniture, pianos and urns, similar to what I imagine Liberace’s house look like. The walls are hung with the usual assortment of well-fed Hanoverians.” Plus: No bathrooms for you, lowly peasant!
Austin usually has hot, dry summers with a high pressure system parked over us for months on end, but this year it’s been the worst since The Great Drought of 2011, where something like 98% of the state was in stage four drought conditions.
Thus far this year, the drought hasn’t been as bad (we had a decent amount of rain in spring), but the temperature has been more extreme, as this week saw a break from Austin suffering a record 45 days over 100°.
Remember that favoring trendy green energy sources like solar and wind over natural gas was a big contributing factor to the 2021 ice storm blackouts. Hopefully Texas lawmakers have learned their lesson, and more reliable baseload power has come online since.
As always, it’s best to be prepared with flashlights, batteries and maybe a portable power source to power fans and medical devices. (That’s the one that gets the best reviews on Amazon. I just got another power source, but since it came free as part of one of those “Redeem your company’s award points for merchandise from this catalog” type deals, I don’t have enough experience with it to recommend it yet.) You might also consider a home generator, like this one, but those are pricey, loud, and I have no direct experience with them, so you probably want to do some research if you’re going that route.
Here’s a bit of appliance review that, alas, I probably can’t profit from in any way, since Amazon doesn’t seem to sell the model.
My old Whirpool washer died in December, so I did some research as to what washer I should be. And most of my research was watching this video:
And the two brands he recommended were:
The Speed Queen TC5000, for which I was quoted delivery times of 6-8 weeks, and
The Maytag MVWP575GW, which I could order directly from Maytag in about a week for around a grand, plus shipping and install. So that’s what I did.
That’s more than you’re going to pay for an average washer these days. I’ve been using it for six months now, and I’m pretty satisfied.
What’s so special about it? It uses commercial grade mechanical parts instead of cheap plastic parts and fragile electronics.
It’s a dumb washer rather than a smart one. This has many benefits:
Once you press Start, instead of spending 20 or 30 seconds with the “Sensing” LED lit up, it simply starts filing the tub with water.
If you forget to add something you meant to wash, you press the same Start button, lift the lid, put it back down, and press it again, and the washer simply starts washing where it left off. It doesn’t blink lights at you accusingly and refuse to run until you unplug and replug the machine.
So far it’s never stopped mid-cycle for no discernible reason.
It finishes washing quicker, even with a presoak and extra spin.
America’s misguided energy- and water-saving regulations have left us with an array of devices that inferior to earlier generations of dumb devices at the main job they were designed for.
As the 88th Texas legislature regular session races toward sine die on May 29, here’s a quick update on two bills that caught my attention:
The senate is debating a bill to prevent banks from tracking firearms purchases. Good. We should not be letting the government set up a gun confiscation list, or banks a list to start banning law-abiding gun owners based on the goal of goosing their ESG scores.
The Biden family and its business associates created a complicated web of more than 20 companies, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee — a system, GOP lawmakers say, that was meant to conceal money received from foreign nationals.
Sixteen of the companies were limited liability companies formed during Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president, the committee said in a press conference on Wednesday. The Biden family, their business associates, and their companies received more than $10 million from foreign nationals’ and their related companies, the records show. These payments occurred both while Biden was in office as vice president and after his time in office ended.
In what Representative Nancy Mace called an act of “financial gymnastics,” many payments were routed from foreign companies to the Biden family’s business associates’ companies which then doled out payments to the Bidens in incremental payments to different bank accounts in an alleged attempt to hide the source of the funds.
At least nine Biden family members received payments, according to committee chairman James Comer. That includes Hunter Biden; James Biden; James Biden’s wife, Sara Jones Biden; the late Beau Biden’s wife, Hallie Biden; Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen; and “three children of the president’s son and the president’s brother.”
Much of the money came from Chinese nationals and companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Multiple Biden family members received money after it passed through an associate’s account. Comer said of the countries the Biden family was influence peddling in, China is “the most reputable.”
The committee revealed Wednesday that records suggest the Biden family and its associates’ business dealings in Romania “bear clear indication of a scheme to peddle influence” from 2015 to 2017.
At the time, then-Vice President Biden spoke out against Romanian corruption while the Biden family received more than a million dollars from a company controlled by a Romanian national, Gabriel Popoviciu. Popoviciu, who has been accused of corruption, sent the money through a Biden family associate, according to the committee. Sixteen of the seventeen payments involved in the deal occurred while Biden was still in office. The money “stops flowing from the Romanian national soon after Joe Biden leaves the vice presidency,” Comer said.
The Bidens also received “millions of dollars from China,” with Comer saying it is “inconceivable that the president did not know” about the payments.
Comer said the information revealed Wednesday is the result of subpoenas to four different banks and stressed that the committee is still early in its investigation and believes there are as many as 12 banks with records relevant to its investigation.
Naturally, the mainstream media are doing their very best to ignore these revelations…
You might have noticed a meme floating around the media about how Britons could become “no better off than people living in Poland”. “If the UK continues with the same level of growth it has seen for the last decade,” writes Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time”:
It sounds like an absurd idea that in 2040 we might see complaints in the Polish press about a flood of British plumbers undercutting wages, or Brytyjski Skleps lining the rougher areas of Warsaw, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
This talking point has also appeared in the Telegraph, the Express and the Financial Times. It often comes with a sense of vague alarm and bewilderment. Poland? The post-communist place? Don’t they live entirely off vodka and potatoes? Don’t they have horses clippety-cloppeting down the streets selling women’s underwear pinched off a truck in Germany? Poland?
Having lived in Poland for nine years, I can say that I am not at all surprised by these projections. To be clear, that is all they are — projections. A lot can change in nine years, in Britain and in Poland.
Still, I think a lot of British people would be surprised by how much better things can be in the land of Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II. Equally, a lot of Polish people would be surprised by how much worse things can be in Britain — given that a lot of Poles of my acquaintance appear to think that getting rich in the U.K. is as easy as walking outside with a wheelbarrow and catching the banknotes that rain down from the sky.
Britain has had minimal economic growth for years. Poland has long been enjoying some of the highest economic growth in Europe. It even emerged from the pandemic better off than other European nations with, as Paweł Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos wrote for the LSE, “a relatively lax approach to economic lockdown and a bit of sheer luck”.
Institutions often seem to work better as well. I can generally visit a GP on the day I call. Britons often have to wait for more than a week. Maternal mortality is higher in the UK — and infant mortality is about the same, despite Britain being much richer overall. Actually, Polish life expectancy as whole is just a touch shorter than British life expectancy, despite the nation having a lot more smokers.
Polish kids have ranked higher on the PISA education rankings than British kids — ranking, indeed, the third highest in Europe in science and maths, and the fourth in reading comprehension. Poland is a more peaceful place than Britain, with murder and rape generally being rarer (granted, statistics in the latter case are famously difficult to trust). Terrorism, for reasons I leave to the reader, has been almost non-existent in Polish society.
Some Polish achievements are more difficult to quantify. In Britain, the 20th century was marked by a curious habit of ripping down beautiful buildings and constructing ugly ones. Poland, meanwhile, has been beautifully renovating and reconstructing many of its urban spaces, pursuing a philosophy of “preservation meets modernisation”. Warsaw and Kraków are famous enough, but travellers could also visit lovely towns and cities like Wrocław, Toruń and Gdańsk — or my own, Tarnowskie Góry.
Also, Poland seems to have actual conservatives who aren’t afraid to push for the right policies, instead of timid functionaries scared of their own shadow.
Last quarter, Disney+ lost 2.4 million subscribers. But this quarter is different! This quarter, Disney+ lost 4 million subscribers.
Related. “They got these ulterior motives, and you know, it’s about this this sort of political shit. And, yeah, I guess that’s part of it. But a lot of it is just these guys are just fucking stupid.”
British-born Laurence Brown has a YouTube channel dedicated to documenting the differences between Britain and the USA. In the last year, he’s become and American citizen and bought a house in the suburbs (Chicago’s, alas), and has some observations, mostly positive, about American suburbs, including the community of dog owners, immaculate lawns, and America’s love affair with rectangles.
Smoothly-run offices have high retention rates and low attrition rates. So what does it tell you that Texas Democratic State Rep. Jolanda Jones has a 100% attrition rate in her senior staffers last week?
The senior staff for Democrat State Rep. Jolanda Jones of Houston announced their resignation over her ‘toxic and unethical’ behavior Thursday.
A Democrat behaving toxicly and unethically?
Jones, a freshman in the Texas House and former contestant on the reality show Survivor, reportedly “actively covered up [her] son Jio’s inappropriate relationship with one of [her] interns, who is significantly younger than him and is in a power imbalance, and [is] now using [her] position to intimidate and silence [her] own staff members.”
Nepotism? Check. Sexual harassment? Check. Also, Jiovanni Jones is evidently out on bail on felony drug charges. Criminal charges? Check.
According to Jones’ senior staff, she “continued to endorse, encourage, and create an abusive and hostile work environment in the workplace without accountability for [her] or [her] relatives’ actions.”
Jones’ chief of staff, legislative director, and district director told her to “own your S.H.I.T.,” in reference to Jones’ book titled “Owning My S.H.I.T.: Suffering Hardship Internalizing Trauma.”
Social justice warrior on social justice warrior fratricide? Check.
The staff’s resignation letter, which can be read in full below, focused mainly on an alleged inappropriate relationship between Jones’ son, Jiovanni Jones, and an intern in the office:
“Jio is not only your son, but General Counsel at Elite Change Inc. (registered lobbying firm and also the financial vehicle of your campaign manager, Dallas Jones).
More nepotism plus a mechanism to rake off campaign donations into your family’s pockets? Check.
This inappropriate relationship may constitute as sexual harassment or a conflict of interest between his office of employment and your state office.
“It is concerning that you have not taken any steps to address his behavior, and instead have chosen to put everyone in the office at risk,” said the senior staff. “Your son is an absolute liability, and his behavior is now affecting the livelihoods and credibility of everyone on your payroll. It is so disappointing to see that while you build your profile on overcoming abuse, you cannot stand up to the abuser that you raised. You are holding a legal case hostage over your son’s girlfriend because you allow him to gaslight and emotionally and physically abuse all the women in his life – work and personal – while dragging your entire office through it.”
Funny how when you start digging into charges of cronyism against a Democratic office holder, a whole host of other unsavory activity comes tumbling out into the open…
